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Nine Pieces Of Evidence That Confirm The Historical Accuracy Of The Bible

joelr

Well-Known Member
Nope, you're the one out in left field. What I posted were examples I've seen over and over again from liberals who claim to be Christian. I've yet to see one of them who doesn't screw up either the deity of Jesus, the resurrection, repentance, or the historical Jesus / Gospels.

And once again, for the third time you mistakenly believe modern liberals have anything to do with Jesus? I don't know if you are just stubborn or just cannot understand simple concepts like liberalism is defined differently by different cultures in different centuries.

Jesus was teaching a very liberal version of Judaism. This makes him a liberal as well.
It doesn't matter what modern liberals are doing or not doing. What "liberal" was in 100AD was what Jesus was doing.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
People who say Jesus is not a God of divine Judgment like in the OT fail to mention the Judgments of Jesus in the Book of Revelation. You just made that same error yourself.


I made no error. Jesus may say he is god but he also says he is not god.
This situation is very typical of the bible since it's man-made and imperfect. So there are many contradictions that were missed. I

https://www.josh.org/answer/jesus-claim-god-even-believe/

"Anyone wishing to refute the case for Christianity must explain away the story of the resurrection."

Not hard, it's pagan savior deity fiction and the Jews wanted one for themselves because everyone around them was getting one, the Syrians, Egyptians, Thracians, Persians. Since the gospels read as religious fiction which is a specific type of writing style that uses a number of allegoric literary devices there is no question Jesus was just another mythical deity.


You know, I've never seen a view of the New Testament and the deity of Jesus Christ so bizarre as how you butcher it. You're way, way out in left field, far left of even a gaggle of spiritually-challenged liberal theologians. Quite frankly, your views are BIZARRE. I don't know of any mainstream church that has such a twisted view of scripture as what you put out daily. It's completely alien to the truth of Jesus Christ and built on a foundation of lies and fantasies.

The more you say the word "bizarre" doesn't make it more true.

Your just showing your ignorance here. Of course "church" doesn't teach any history that makes the religion seem like just another religion based on supernatural fiction?
ALL religions have an agenda and a narrative they teach to make the historical aspects seem plausible.
The idea that you suggested that church's would teach things that would demonstrate the fact that Christianity is a pagan tradition is absurd? Why would they do that? They are not in the business of pushing members away?

Everything I use is only current PhD scholarship from the biblical historicity field.
It isn't "left field" or "spiritually challenged" anything? It's actual PhD historians doing actual research. It's weird to you because you are hidden in a bubble where you ignore scholarship and pretend like only fringe "left wing" people disagree with your religion.
Many religious leaders at some point come across actual history and are usually shocked at how bad they have been lied to.
In The God Who Wasn't There an ex-Pastor details how none of the relevant history was taught to him at Divinity school.

Historicity is not bias, they just report on facts, they don't have to hide and ignore actual facts to keep believers from learning the truth.
This information is standard and peer-reviewed (other PhDs have checked and verified that the work is accurate). The vast majority (besides a few fundamentalists) of historians believe Jesus was a teacher who was later mythicized into a supernatural deity.


The historical reliability of the Gospels refers to the reliability and historic character of the four New Testament gospels as historical documents.

When judging the historical reliability of the gospels, scholars ask if the accounts in the gospels are, when judged using normal standards that historians use on other ancient writings, reliable or not.[


Most scholars hold to the two-source hypothesis which claims that the Gospel of Mark was written first. According to the hypothesis, the authors of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke then used the Gospel of Mark and the hypothetical [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_document']Q document
, in addition to some other sources, to write their individual gospels.[/URL]

Strictly speaking, each Gospel is anonymous


The [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel']gospels
of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels because of a similar sequence and wording. They are also composed in Koine Greek and the majority of Mark and roughly half of Matthew and Luke coincide in content, in much the same sequence, often nearly verbatim.[/URL]
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
Stop right there. "WE" don't know of any such thing.

My NIV Bible says, about the authorship of Matthew, "The early church fathers were unanimous in holding that Matthew, one of the twelve disciples, was its author."

That's nice, educated people do not agree. The title is a Greek way to say it was said by someone else.

Gospel According to Matthew Euangélion katà Maththaîon; (As told by Matthew)

"The gospel itself does not specify an author, but he was probably a male Jew, standing on the margin between traditional and non-traditional Jewish values, and familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time.[7] The majority of modern scholars believe that Mark was the first gospel to be composed and that Matthew (who includes some 600 of Mark's 661 verses) and Luke both drew upon it as a major source for their works.["

For Mark, the notation is, "...it was the unanimous testimony of the early church that this Gospel was written by John Mark."

Gospel According to Mark Euangélion katà Mârkon) (As told by Mark)
Authorship and genre

"The Gospel of Mark is anonymous.[7] It was probably written c. AD 66–70, during Nero's persecution of the Christians in Rome or the Jewish revolt, as suggested by internal references to war in Judea and to persecution.[3] The author used a variety of pre-existing sources, such as conflict stories (Mark 2:1–3:6), apocalyptic discourse (4:1–35), and collections of sayings (although not the Gospel of Thomas and probably not the Q source).[8] It was written in Greek for a gentile audience. Alternative places of composition include Rome, Galilee, Antioch (third-largest city in the Roman Empire, located in northern Syria), and southern Syria.[9] Early Christian tradition attributes it to John Mark mentioned in Acts, but scholars generally reject this as an attempt to link the gospel to an authoritative figure[4]"




For Luke is says, "...much unmistakable evidence points to Luke (as the author)."

LUKE:

The author is not named in either volume.[7] According to a Church tradition dating from the 2nd century he was the Luke named as a companion of Paul in three of the letters attributed to Paul himself, but "a critical consensus emphasizes the countless contradictions between the account in Acts and the authentic Pauline letters (Theissen and Merz 1998, p.32)."[8] An example can be seen by comparing Acts' accounts of Paul's conversion (Acts 9:1–31, 22:6–21, and 26:9–23) with Paul's own statement that he remained unknown to Christians in Judea after that event (Galatians 1:17–24).[16] Luke admired Paul, but his theology was significantly different from Paul's on key points and he does not (in Acts) represent Paul's views accurately.[17] He was educated, a man of means, probably urban, and someone who respected manual work, although not a worker himself; this is significant, because more high-brow writers of the time looked down on the artisans and small business-people who made up the early church of Paul and were presumably Luke's audience.[18]

The eclipse of the traditional attribution to Luke the companion of Paul has meant that an early date for the gospel is now rarely put forward.[8] Some experts date the composition of the combined work to around 80–90 AD, although some others suggest 90–110,[19] and there is textual evidence (the conflicts between Western and Alexandrian manuscript families) that Luke–Acts was still being substantially revised well into the 2nd century.[10]








There's simpler explanations than having to posit the theory that the other Gospel authors copied Mark. One is that Matthew and Peter and John most likely sat around campfires after Jesus' resurrection and recalled what Jesus said and did. No doubt Jesus went over everything with them in the 40 days after his resurrection and before his ascension. The disciples may have even taken notes on parchment to be used later in their separate Gospels. In addition, in John 14 John clearly cites the Holy Spirit as helping them recall what Jesus taught. That's the source skeptics ALWAYS sweep under the rug because they can't stand to admit the supernatural.


Ha, of course there's always some conspiracy theory with supernatural wu-wu.
No "source skeptics" ignore that because saying John has special magic memory powers as a solution is moronic and scholarship doesn't work that way. But that's a funny conspiracy anyway - "hey man, they are ignoring the magic-memory powers given to them by spirits!"

But the idea of "writing notes on parchment" besides being complete speculation is also far less simple? Look at this chart, a ginormous list of verbatim parallels. On parchment? No chance.

Gospel harmony - Wikipedia


Again, the writers were not "at campfires", they were highly educated scholars writing high level fiction.

we've already been here, the campfire thing is pure speculation. There is no way to account for the highly educated writing style in Mark which uses a long list of literary devices, devices only used with mythical fiction of the times as well. It was so highly mythical that it scores an almost perfect score on the Rank-Ragalin mythic scale putting the Jesus story as mythical as King Arthur.



"The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke bear a striking resemblance to each other, so much so that their contents can easily be set side by side in parallel columns. The fact that they share so much material verbatim and yet also exhibit important differences has led to a number of hypotheses explaining their interdependence, a phenomenon termed the Synoptic Problem."
 

Spartan

Well-Known Member
That's nice, educated people do not agree. The title is a Greek way to say it was said by someone else.

Gospel According to Matthew Euangélion katà Maththaîon; (As told by Matthew)

"The gospel itself does not specify an author, but he was probably a male Jew, standing on the margin between traditional and non-traditional Jewish values, and familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time.[7] The majority of modern scholars believe that Mark was the first gospel to be composed and that Matthew (who includes some 600 of Mark's 661 verses) and Luke both drew upon it as a major source for their works.["



Gospel According to Mark Euangélion katà Mârkon) (As told by Mark)
Authorship and genre

"The Gospel of Mark is anonymous.[7] It was probably written c. AD 66–70, during Nero's persecution of the Christians in Rome or the Jewish revolt, as suggested by internal references to war in Judea and to persecution.[3] The author used a variety of pre-existing sources, such as conflict stories (Mark 2:1–3:6), apocalyptic discourse (4:1–35), and collections of sayings (although not the Gospel of Thomas and probably not the Q source).[8] It was written in Greek for a gentile audience. Alternative places of composition include Rome, Galilee, Antioch (third-largest city in the Roman Empire, located in northern Syria), and southern Syria.[9] Early Christian tradition attributes it to John Mark mentioned in Acts, but scholars generally reject this as an attempt to link the gospel to an authoritative figure[4]"


LUKE:

The author is not named in either volume.[7] According to a Church tradition dating from the 2nd century he was the Luke named as a companion of Paul in three of the letters attributed to Paul himself, but "a critical consensus emphasizes the countless contradictions between the account in Acts and the authentic Pauline letters (Theissen and Merz 1998, p.32)."[8] An example can be seen by comparing Acts' accounts of Paul's conversion (Acts 9:1–31, 22:6–21, and 26:9–23) with Paul's own statement that he remained unknown to Christians in Judea after that event (Galatians 1:17–24).[16] Luke admired Paul, but his theology was significantly different from Paul's on key points and he does not (in Acts) represent Paul's views accurately.[17] He was educated, a man of means, probably urban, and someone who respected manual work, although not a worker himself; this is significant, because more high-brow writers of the time looked down on the artisans and small business-people who made up the early church of Paul and were presumably Luke's audience.[18]

The eclipse of the traditional attribution to Luke the companion of Paul has meant that an early date for the gospel is now rarely put forward.[8] Some experts date the composition of the combined work to around 80–90 AD, although some others suggest 90–110,[19] and there is textual evidence (the conflicts between Western and Alexandrian manuscript families) that Luke–Acts was still being substantially revised well into the 2nd century.[10]


Ha, of course there's always some conspiracy theory with supernatural wu-wu.
No "source skeptics" ignore that because saying John has special magic memory powers as a solution is moronic and scholarship doesn't work that way. But that's a funny conspiracy anyway - "hey man, they are ignoring the magic-memory powers given to them by spirits!"

But the idea of "writing notes on parchment" besides being complete speculation is also far less simple? Look at this chart, a ginormous list of verbatim parallels. On parchment? No chance.

Gospel harmony - Wikipedia


Again, the writers were not "at campfires", they were highly educated scholars writing high level fiction.

we've already been here, the campfire thing is pure speculation. There is no way to account for the highly educated writing style in Mark which uses a long list of literary devices, devices only used with mythical fiction of the times as well. It was so highly mythical that it scores an almost perfect score on the Rank-Ragalin mythic scale putting the Jesus story as mythical as King Arthur.

"The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke bear a striking resemblance to each other, so much so that their contents can easily be set side by side in parallel columns. The fact that they share so much material verbatim and yet also exhibit important differences has led to a number of hypotheses explaining their interdependence, a phenomenon termed the Synoptic Problem."

I'll stick with what I previously provided on the traditional Gospel authorship and the reasons for similar content.
 

Spartan

Well-Known Member
I made no error. Jesus may say he is god but he also says he is not god.
This situation is very typical of the bible since it's man-made and imperfect. So there are many contradictions that were missed. I
"Anyone wishing to refute the case for Christianity must explain away the story of the resurrection."

Not hard, it's pagan savior deity fiction and the Jews wanted one for themselves because everyone around them was getting one, the Syrians, Egyptians, Thracians, Persians. Since the gospels read as religious fiction which is a specific type of writing style that uses a number of allegoric literary devices there is no question Jesus was just another mythical deity.

I've already provided examples of Jesus' claims to be God in a previous post. You can claim otherwise ad nauseum but your spiel doesn't work.

What you have with the pagan copy cat claim there is a half-baked theory. A claim without CREDIBLE supporting evidence. I should also point out that just because there are mythical pagan resurrections that doesn't mean that the PHYSICAL resurrection of Jesus was akin to those.

Most scholars hold to the two-source hypothesis which claims that the Gospel of Mark was written first. According to the hypothesis, the authors of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke then used the Gospel of Mark and the hypothetical
Q document, in addition to some other sources, to write their individual gospels.

Nonsense. Q is a hypothetical myth. There are no Q documents that anyone ever found. No fragments, nothing. No one ever heard of it until it was invented in recent centuries. In fact, Q is always whatever a skeptic wants it to be - as long or short as conveniently necessary. It says whatever they want it to say. It's horse manure. It's been debunked in the following articles:

The Case Against Q: Fallacies at the Heart of Q

The Case Against Q: Ten Reasons

Strictly speaking, each Gospel is anonymous

Strictly speaking, that's nonsense. Numerous early church fathers confirm the traditional Gospel authorships.

Who Wrote the Gospels? Internal and External Arguments for Traditional Authorship
 

Spartan

Well-Known Member
And once again, for the third time you mistakenly believe modern liberals have anything to do with Jesus? I don't know if you are just stubborn or just cannot understand simple concepts like liberalism is defined differently by different cultures in different centuries.

Jesus was teaching a very liberal version of Judaism. This makes him a liberal as well.
It doesn't matter what modern liberals are doing or not doing. What "liberal" was in 100AD was what Jesus was doing.

Already debunked in my previous posts.
 

Milton Platt

Well-Known Member
I always chuckle on how people scratch each others back to disprove the Bible as they cherry pick scriptures and/or twist them to their liking.

We understand, of course, that when one is in disagreement and don't agree, anything can be constructed to confirm and validate their position.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, intelligent people continue to change their position and believe what the Bible says.

Go figure. :rolleyes:
How does the fact that a book written thousands of years ago has historical data in it evidence that it was divinely inspired or that there is a god? Tom Sawyer has historical data in it. The Quran has historical data in it, Superman comic books have historical data in them.....
 

Spartan

Well-Known Member
How does the fact that a book written thousands of years ago has historical data in it evidence that it was divinely inspired or that there is a god? Tom Sawyer has historical data in it. The Quran has historical data in it, Superman comic books have historical data in them.....

The Messianic prophecies about Jesus in the Gospels were fulfilled at a rate astronomically higher than chance.
 

Spartan

Well-Known Member
That's nice, educated people do not agree. The title is a Greek way to say it was said by someone else.

Gospel According to Matthew Euangélion katà Maththaîon; (As told by Matthew)

"The gospel itself does not specify an author, but he was probably a male Jew, standing on the margin between traditional and non-traditional Jewish values, and familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time.[7] The majority of modern scholars believe that Mark was the first gospel to be composed and that Matthew (who includes some 600 of Mark's 661 verses) and Luke both drew upon it as a major source for their works.["


Gospel According to Mark Euangélion katà Mârkon) (As told by Mark)
Authorship and genre

"The Gospel of Mark is anonymous.[7] It was probably written c. AD 66–70, during Nero's persecution of the Christians in Rome or the Jewish revolt, as suggested by internal references to war in Judea and to persecution.[3] The author used a variety of pre-existing sources, such as conflict stories (Mark 2:1–3:6), apocalyptic discourse (4:1–35), and collections of sayings (although not the Gospel of Thomas and probably not the Q source).[8] It was written in Greek for a gentile audience. Alternative places of composition include Rome, Galilee, Antioch (third-largest city in the Roman Empire, located in northern Syria), and southern Syria.[9] Early Christian tradition attributes it to John Mark mentioned in Acts, but scholars generally reject this as an attempt to link the gospel to an authoritative figure[4]"



LUKE:

The author is not named in either volume.[7] According to a Church tradition dating from the 2nd century he was the Luke named as a companion of Paul in three of the letters attributed to Paul himself, but "a critical consensus emphasizes the countless contradictions between the account in Acts and the authentic Pauline letters (Theissen and Merz 1998, p.32)."[8] An example can be seen by comparing Acts' accounts of Paul's conversion (Acts 9:1–31, 22:6–21, and 26:9–23) with Paul's own statement that he remained unknown to Christians in Judea after that event (Galatians 1:17–24).[16] Luke admired Paul, but his theology was significantly different from Paul's on key points and he does not (in Acts) represent Paul's views accurately.[17] He was educated, a man of means, probably urban, and someone who respected manual work, although not a worker himself; this is significant, because more high-brow writers of the time looked down on the artisans and small business-people who made up the early church of Paul and were presumably Luke's audience.[18]

The eclipse of the traditional attribution to Luke the companion of Paul has meant that an early date for the gospel is now rarely put forward.[8] Some experts date the composition of the combined work to around 80–90 AD, although some others suggest 90–110,[19] and there is textual evidence (the conflicts between Western and Alexandrian manuscript families) that Luke–Acts was still being substantially revised well into the 2nd century.[10]




Ha, of course there's always some conspiracy theory with supernatural wu-wu.
No "source skeptics" ignore that because saying John has special magic memory powers as a solution is moronic and scholarship doesn't work that way. But that's a funny conspiracy anyway - "hey man, they are ignoring the magic-memory powers given to them by spirits!"

But the idea of "writing notes on parchment" besides being complete speculation is also far less simple? Look at this chart, a ginormous list of verbatim parallels. On parchment? No chance.

Gospel harmony - Wikipedia


Again, the writers were not "at campfires", they were highly educated scholars writing high level fiction.

we've already been here, the campfire thing is pure speculation. There is no way to account for the highly educated writing style in Mark which uses a long list of literary devices, devices only used with mythical fiction of the times as well. It was so highly mythical that it scores an almost perfect score on the Rank-Ragalin mythic scale putting the Jesus story as mythical as King Arthur.



"The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke bear a striking resemblance to each other, so much so that their contents can easily be set side by side in parallel columns. The fact that they share so much material verbatim and yet also exhibit important differences has led to a number of hypotheses explaining their interdependence, a phenomenon termed the Synoptic Problem."

You should read something other than left-wing propaganda.

I'll stick with what I previously posted.
 

Kenny

Face to face with my Father
Premium Member
How does the fact that a book written thousands of years ago has historical data in it evidence that it was divinely inspired or that there is a god? Tom Sawyer has historical data in it. The Quran has historical data in it, Superman comic books have historical data in them.....
When does reality cease being reality?
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
I'll stick with what I previously provided on the traditional Gospel authorship and the reasons for similar content.
I already know you have no interest in knowing if what you believe is true or not, it's redundant to keep saying that.

We have already covered this, what you provided was not written by a PhD historian, it did not explain why the Greek title says it was written by someone other than the author and the best they can do with the English version is say "evidence strongly suggests" (while it doesn't). Even Christian scholars admit the gospels are anonymous, it isn't up for debate.

There are no debates among biblical scholars as to the gospels being anonymous. They simply accept the fact and move on. It's considered a fact that sometime in the 2nd century the church leaders took the 4 gospels and tacked those names on them and this is when they used the "kata" signature. A unique way to say the y were written by someone unknown.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
I've already provided examples of Jesus' claims to be God in a previous post. You can claim otherwise ad nauseum but your spiel doesn't work.
It isn't "my spiel", like I said Jesus also says he is NOT god in the bible. So this would be Jesus's spiel.
Or is he not qualified to speak on his behalf?

What you have with the pagan copy cat claim there is a half-baked theory. A claim without CREDIBLE supporting evidence. I should also point out that just because there are mythical pagan resurrections that doesn't mean that the PHYSICAL resurrection of Jesus was akin to those.
Of course there is credible supporting evidence? There are scriptures - 6 of them pre-christian - of other dying/rising savior gods in different religions.
In each religion the resurrection was considered to be a real physical resurrection.
Of course to you they are myth and the Jesus story is real. Well, to others (like most biblical historians) they are ALL myth.

The Jesus version is no different, it's written as myth using similar literary devices and like the pagan demi-gods there isn't any historical proof outside of the scriptures from each religion.

Nonsense. Q is a hypothetical myth. There are no Q documents that anyone ever found. No fragments, nothing. No one ever heard of it until it was invented in recent centuries. In fact, Q is always whatever a skeptic wants it to be - as long or short as conveniently necessary. It says whatever they want it to say. It's horse manure. It's been debunked in the following articles:

The Case Against Q: Fallacies at the Heart of Q

The Case Against Q: Ten Reasons
http://www.markgoodacre.org/Q/ten.htm

Wait, didn't we already cover this? Do you have a memory issue? I already pointed out information from the leading PhD expert in the world on the Q theory, Marc Goodacre and it's now believed that there was no Q. Matthew was copied from Mark, they have a 90% verbatim Greek copy rate and 50% into others. So there is no need for a Q gospel.

Strictly speaking, that's nonsense. Numerous early church fathers confirm the traditional Gospel authorships.

Who Wrote the Gospels? Internal and External Arguments for Traditional Authorship


Oh my god, you did not just post that same article for the 3rd time????????????????
I already had to comment on it in the post I just made? Now you're back at it?
The article does not explain anything. It does not explain why the title says "AS TOLD TO ME BY MARK",

The gospels are anonymous.
Let's flush out that little lie anyways - "Numerous early church fathers confirm the traditional Gospel authorships"
Why did you say that? The first mention of the names would be possibly Bishop Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, written around the 2nd century which is exactly when historians believe names were added to the gospels.
No article that tries to suggest the authors names are actually the authors will even attempt to explain why someone would write a gospel then put "As told to me by Mark" in the title.
All 4 gospels have this insignia in the title.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
Already debunked in my previous posts.
Do you even know what debunked means?
No you have never debunked the idea that Jesus was a liberal Jew in his day. All you keep doing is posting information about modern liberals and comparing Jesus to modern liberals.

What Jesus was teaching sounds similar to the Hillilites who were liberals.
In those times liberalism included concepts like - allowing gentiles into the religion, non-judgment, bending of purity laws etc...

Your last fail was to link Jesus with the OT god and try to make off like that means Jesus wasn't liberal.
Well Jesus was teaching liberal concepts and the Jesus movement was a liberal faction.
You can't change the past and you cannot compare bronze age liberals to modern liberals.
In those days what Jesus was teaching was a liberal philosophy. So he was liberal.

He condemed people to hell, so what? That was common in those days. He was still the most liberal version of hell-condemers and the Sermon on the Mount is considered revolutionary and liberal compared to opposing views.

Stop comparing ancient people from 2000 years ago to modern liberals as if they are all hanging out in 1 group.

To understand if someone was liberal you have to compare them to their contemporaries. Comparing Jesus to a modern conservative and thinking that means Jesus must be conservative is truly moronic.
 

joelr

Well-Known Member
The Messianic prophecies about Jesus in the Gospels were fulfilled at a rate astronomically higher than chance.

We have been over this. The gospel writers were far too educated and skilled in mythical fiction to have not been scholars of their day.
They clearly had access to OT prophecies and wrote the NT to appear to fulfill the stories.

This is how all religious prophecies are fulfilled over time.


Thinking that it's evidence is embarassing.
 
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